SECONDWORLD

One of the only survivors of a bizarre holocaust in Miami caused by lethal red flakes falling from the sky, NCIS agent Lincoln Miller must defuse a late-developing plot hatched by the Nazis to reboot the planet with Aryans by killing everyone else.

In the initial attacks, Tokyo and Tel Aviv also lose millions of people to the ghastly storms, which deplete the target areas of oxygen and poison anyone who comes into contact with the deposits. Miller, a former SEAL who was underwater when Miami receives its lethal rainfall, becomes the president's go-to guy to save the world. Before he can take on the bad guys, he has to figure out how to keep breathing (he collects abandoned SCUBA tanks). Then he has to evade grim-faced snipers and assassins and survive an assortment of gunshots, car crashes and blows to the head. With sidekicks including a German female Interpol agent whose grandparents were among the scientists participating in hideous Nazi experiments, Miller discovers that thousands of stealth antigravity satellites are hovering up above to capture refined iron and shoot it downward as toxic ammo. His desperate efforts take him from New Hampshire to Europe to Antarctica, and from abject fear to wisecracks. Has he really turned his cell phone into a targeting device for a nuclear missile, he's asked. "That a problem?" he replies. A brisk thriller with neatly timed action sequences, snappy dialogue and the ultimate sympathetic figure in a badly burned little girl with a fighting spirit, this novel doesn't waste time addressing such matters as why the fate of the world rests in the hands of one man.

The Nazis are determined to have the last gruesome laugh in this efficient doomsday thriller.